Alexander Michael's has been at 401 West 9th Street since January 1983. That makes it younger than most of the buildings around it, and older than almost every other restaurant in Charlotte. The building it occupies, according to the restaurant's own history, opened in 1897 as The Berryhill Store, also known as the Crowell-Berryhill Store — the corner grocery at the intersection of 9th and Pine, in what was then the residential heart of Fourth Ward.
Here is what is verified right now.
The address. 401 West 9th Street, Charlotte, NC. Fourth Ward. The phone is (704) 332-6789.
Hours. Tuesday through Saturday, lunch 11 a.m.–3 p.m., dinner 3 p.m.–10 p.m. Closed Sunday and Monday.
No reservations. First-come, first-served. The restaurant's own website is explicit: "the entire party must be present before weekend seating." That is a house rule worth planning around.
The 1897 building. Alexander Michael's operates out of the Crowell-Berryhill Store, per the restaurant's history. The store opened in 1897 and operated as a neighborhood grocery. In the middle of the twentieth century the building moved through other uses — a paint store, a laundromat, a gym. In the late 1970s, Cullie and Sylvia Tarleton refurbished it. The early 1980s saw it operate briefly as a neighborhood store and deli. Alexander Michael's tavern opened there in January 1983.
The name. "Alexander Michael's" is built from the names of the two men who originally leased the space and opened the tavern: A. Michael Troiano Jr. and Alexander Copeland III.
The current owner. Steve Casner, since 2005.
Now the part of the room worth asking about.
The bar. Per the restaurant, the bar and the back bar were made from solid oak doors that were originally in the Independence Building — Charlotte's first skyscraper, a twelve-story Frank Pierce Milburn design that stood at the corner of Trade and Tryon, completed in 1908. NCpedia describes the Independence Building as "the first steel-frame high-rise building in North Carolina" and "considered to have been the state's first true 'skyscraper.'" It was imploded in September 1981.
Alexander Michael's opened fifteen months later, in January 1983, with oak doors from the demolished 1908 building repurposed into the bar. The bar in Fourth Ward that people have been ordering at for forty-three years is, in a material sense, a piece of downtown Charlotte that came down four years before the tavern opened. The building at 401 West 9th predates the skyscraper by eleven years. The bar inside it is salvage from the skyscraper's demolition. It is all Charlotte.
What this publication has not yet verified. The full ownership chain of the Crowell-Berryhill Store (the Star Mills Grocery Company origin, the Berryhill family's operation of the store into the twentieth century) appears in the broader public record around the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Historic Landmarks Commission's designated-property documentation, but we have not yet fetched that source directly for this publication. When we do, the Archivist will publish a full profile of the building on the Neighborhood reference. The current menu at Alexander Michael's — specific dishes, specific prices — is also not published on the restaurant's homepage at the time of writing. We'll walk it and publish.
See also: this building is stop 10 on the Historic Fourth Ward walking tour, which treats the 1897 Crowell-Berryhill Store in the broader architectural context of the neighborhood.
Editorial note. A Fourth Ward resident's mental map has Alexander Michael's on it. That is a functional fact — the restaurant has been the neighborhood tavern for a generation — and the institutional memory held inside the building is part of why. Every Fourth Ward building has a story. Most don't have their own story pressed into the furniture. This one does.
For reference: visit Tuesday through Saturday, arrive with your whole party, and if you're at the bar, ask about the oak.
Sources
- Alexander Michael's Restaurant and Tavern, official website / history. almikestavern.com. Retrieved April 24, 2026.
- Independence Building. NCpedia. ncpedia.org/independence-building. Retrieved April 24, 2026.